Six aboard Nantucket air ambulance presumed dead as Canada leads the inquiry

For three days this was a search story. From the moment a Latitude Air Ambulance jet lost contact south of Nantucket on 3 October, the open question was whether anyone could be found alive. It is now an investigation story, and the first question has the answer nobody wanted. The US Coast Guard suspended its search at sunset on Sunday 4 October without recovering anyone from the water. Latitude says its four crew, its patient and her son are presumed dead. ⁵⁹⁴³

This updates our report of 5 October, which found the search still under way, debris matched to the aircraft and the six occupants unaccounted for. The change is real but narrower than it sounds. No one has been recovered, so "presumed dead" is the operator's formal declaration after the search ended. It is not a finding drawn from remains. What has genuinely moved is the institutional picture: the rescue is over, and Canada's Transportation Safety Board has taken the lead on finding out why a medical jet with a stroke patient aboard went into the Atlantic.

The Coast Guard and Bermuda police named all six on Monday. The passengers were Marilyn Lavonne Bean, 66, and her son Sergio Wayne Lottimore, 41, both Bermudian. A family friend said she was being flown to Boston for medical care after a stroke the previous week. The four Canadian crew were Captain Philip Gregory Childerhose, First Officer Thomas Henry Farquhar, flight nurse Sarah Jane Paton and respiratory therapist Jolene Beth Weir, all employed by Hamilton, Ontario-based Latitude. ³⁹⁴⁴⁴⁵

The names settle a point early reports left muddy. Some accounts described two passengers and four crew, others a patient and a family member with the crew. Those are the same people. ¹⁸

Latitude's president, Peter Byl, called the loss "unimaginable" and said the company's focus is on the families and on helping investigators. The company says it will not speculate on cause. Bermuda's Premier, David Burt, said on 3 October that the government was praying all six would be found. After the search ended he said the worst fears had been realised. ⁵⁰⁷⁴

The aircraft was a Gulfstream G100, registration C-GRJP, flying as Heartbeat 104. It left L.F. Wade International Airport in Bermuda at about 12:41 a.m. on Saturday 3 October, bound for Boston. The FAA notified the Coast Guard at about 2 a.m., and the Coast Guard's response began then. Debris was found overnight into Sunday. ⁸⁶

Two checkable points differ between outlets. CBC reported on 4 October that contact with air traffic control was lost around 1:30 a.m. ABC reported later that day that the FAA lost contact around 2 a.m. These may be two different milestones, a controller's last exchange and the point at which the FAA raised the alarm, but no source reconciles them. ⁵⁴

The size of the search is reported in two snapshots that should not be merged. At the Sunday briefing the Coast Guard said about 2,840 square miles had been covered over about 53.5 hours. CTV's 7,300 square kilometres and CBC's "more than 7,000" are the same scale in metric. At suspension the figures were about 66 hours and roughly 4,445 square miles. ⁶¹⁵⁹

One thing the hour counts do not explain: counted from the 2 a.m. Saturday alert, sunset on Sunday is about 40 hours, which matches aviation analyst Keith Mackey's "nearly 40 hours". The 53.5 and 66-hour figures fit that clock poorly, and the sources do not say why. Mackey rated the chance of survivors "slim to nil". That was his own assessment, not an official finding. ¹

The TSB is leading investigation A26F0321 because Canada is the state of registry, with the US National Transportation Safety Board taking part as an accredited representative. The TSB says the crew reported electrical difficulties, the aircraft descended rapidly and contact was lost south of Nantucket. It says investigators will deploy in the coming days to help with search and recovery of the aircraft. ⁷⁶³⁸

Beyond that, the public record is thin and contradictory. A source told ABC on 4 October that officials believe the plane dropped 7,500 feet before hitting the water. Fox described a plunge of more than 10,000 feet in three minutes as a storm moved in. CBC cited flight data showing a fall from 24,000 to 11,000 feet about 90 minutes into the flight, then levelling off. The three cannot all be the same measurement: the CBC drop is about 13,000 feet, the largest of the three. They may describe different stretches of one descent, but nothing in the sources says so. Levelling off does not show the aircraft recovered. ⁸⁷⁵

The explanations floating around are hypotheses. ABC's reading of air traffic control audio, in which a controller described the pilot's signal as weak, was that the pilot may have been flying blind with electrical problems. A guest on Fox raised instrumentation failure. The TSB's electrical-difficulties line is the only official word, and it does not say what failed or whether that failure caused the descent. A retired Canadian search-and-rescue coordinator, Jean Houde, told CBC that cause cannot be determined without evidence. ⁴⁷⁵

That is why the wreckage matters more than any theory. The debris lies in water of about 80 to 90 feet, about 20 miles south of Nantucket. Houde called search and recovery at that depth doable. The flight data recorder was not among the debris recovered by Sunday's briefing, and no source I have confirms that the main wreckage or any recorder has since been raised. ⁵⁵⁹

What the facts add up to is a case that will be settled on the seabed rather than in the news cycle. Everything public about the final minutes comes from leaks, audio paraphrased by broadcasters and flight-tracking data. Investigators have not yet published anything they have verified themselves, beyond the TSB's one-sentence outline. The next marker is simple: whether the TSB's deployment produces an announcement that the aircraft and its recorders are out of the water.